In terms of the biggest discovery, 2012 will go down as the year that particle physicists finally found the Higgs boson particle &#8212; or at least a particle that behaves like the Higgs boson theorized by the Standard Model. The Higgs (see: What is the Higgs boson, and why is it important to science?) was discovered in July, and over the last six months the ATLAS and CMS teams at CERN have been further cementing their discovery &#8212; they&#8217;re now 99.999999999% sure that they&#8217;ve found a Higgs-like particle.

2# Electronic-photonic chips

For the last 30 years or so, no list of technological breakthroughs would be complete without at least one mention of IBM &#8212; and this year is no exception. In 2012, IBM made exciting leaps in the realms of quantum computing (more on that later) &#8212; but more importantly, at least in the short term, IBM has announced the first computer chip that integrates both electronic and photonic components on the same die.

The technology is called CMOS-integrated nanophotonics (CINP), and it essentially allows for electrical (transistors, resistors, capacitors) and optical (light emitters, photodetectors, waveguides) to be produced on the same piece of silicon, using a standard 90nm semiconductor process. This not only means that CINP chips can be cheaply produced in bulk, but they&#8217;re also very small and very fast. IBM says that it can fit 50 transceiver pairs (modulator/photodetector) on a 5x5mm die, for a total possible bandwidth of 1.2 terabits per second. Compare this to existing fiber-optic interconnects (found in supercomputers and data centers), which are expensive, bulky, and no where near as fast, and you can see why we&#8217;re so excited.

3# Solar power

A perennial favorite, solar power has enjoyed a slew of interesting and important breakthroughs in the past year. The year began strongly with MIT&#8217;s solar cells made from glass clippings &#8212; a fairly big development, for developing nations &#8212; and ended with the first flexible, fiber-optic solar cells that can be woven into clothes.

2012 was also the year that MIT proposed sun funnels, which could boost solar power efficiency dramatically, and a stealth startup called Twin Creeks debuted an ion cannon (pictured above) that halves the cost of producing solar panels.

4# Quantum entanglement, teleportation, and computing

In 2012 we saw the strongest signs yet that a global, quantum internet might actually be possible. Just two years ago, the record for quantum teleportation was 16km &#8212; and this year, a team of international researchers teleported an entangled qubit 143km (89 miles) between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife. This is significant because 143km is just far enough to reach low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, and so in theory we could now build a world-spanning quantum network. Not to be outdone, China struck back with the first teleportation between macroscopic objects, leading to the possibility of consumer-oriented quantum routers.

Over in England, researchers managed to transmit qubits and binary data down the same piece of optic fiber, laying the groundwork for a conventional internet that&#8217;s secured with quantum cryptography. In related news, Stanford created a machine that excels at entangling photons, ready for fiber-optic transmission. The machine is currently very large, but as we know, miniaturization is a given in the tech world.

5# 3-d Printing

Companies like MakerBot continue to press into the consumer market with new printers such as the Replicator 2. On the industrial side of things, NASA showed off some next-generation rocket engine parts that were fabricated using selective laser melting (3D printing with metal). Third-party 3D printing services, such as Shapeways, will print just about any design you can throw at them &#8212; in plastic, steel, or even silver. Moving back into the realm of the almost-invisible, 2012 even saw the 3D printing of cancer drugs.

6# Brain

Thanks to the National Institutes of Health, we now have the first map of the human brain, revealing a surprisingly simple, grid-like structure (pictured above). &#8220;Map&#8221; might be overstating it a little, though: All we have is a 3D image of the connections; we don&#8217;t have any labels, and we certainly don&#8217;t know the function of each connection. For that, we still need to build a human connectome &#8212; but 2012 has seen a lot of progress in that regard, too. In related news, MIT discovered the location of memories in your brain.

2012 was also a bumper year for brain-computer interfaces: Devices that measure your brain activity, process your neuron spikes to see what you&#8217;re trying to do, and then pass those instructions along to some software. This software might steal passwords from your brain, boost your cranial capacity by offloading multitasking to a computer, or it might be used to control a robotic arm with incredible dexterity (video below).

7# Infinity capacity wireless

Coming back to ExtremeTech&#8217;s core topic, technology, 2012 was the year that Bo Thide and some Italian colleagues in Venice proved that it might be possible to boost the capacity of wireless spectrum &#8212; infinitely. Conventional radio signals are transmitted on a flat plane &#8212; but Thide, by twisting the transmitting and receiving antennae, was able to turn the signal into a corkscrew. By adding another dimension to the mix, this technique adds a lot of extra bandwidth; in theory, if you can coil the corkscrews tight enough, we might never have to worry about the spectrum crunch ever again.

10# Battries.

The exception, as usual, is IBM, which very rarely announces breakthroughs that aren&#8217;t already close to commercial viability. This year, IBM showed off its first lithium-air battery &#8212; a light-weight, ultra-high-density battery that should eventually find a home in electric cars, amongst other places. As the name suggests, IBM&#8217;s li-air battery actually breathes &#8212; it uses oxygen in the atmosphere to create lithium peroxide and electricity, and then when it&#8217;s recharged the oxygen is released. Because it offloads so much &#8220;work&#8221; to the atmosphere, the energy density (kilowatt-hours per kilogram) of IBM&#8217;s lithium-air battery is 15 times greater than conventional li-ion &#8212; and, more importantly, as energy-dense as gasoline.

Granny says Ol' man Higgs ain't gonna like it - first dey lost it, den dey found it, now dey gonna name it after someone else...Higgs boson: Call to rename particle to acknowledge other scientists22 April 2013 - One of the scientists who helped develop the theory of the Higgs boson says the particle should be renamed.

Carl Hagen believes the name should acknowledge the work of others - not just UK physicist Peter Higgs. The long-running debate has been rekindled following speculation that this year's Nobel Prize for Physics will be awarded for the Higgs theory. The detection of a particle thought to be the Higgs was announced at the Large Hadron Collider in June last year. American Prof Hagen told BBC News: "I have always thought that the name was not a proper one. "To single out one individual marginalises the contribution of others involved in the work. Although I did not start this campaign to change the name, I welcome it." Prof Peter Higgs developed a theory of how other sub-atomic particles came to have substance, or mass, and published his work in 1964.

However, other researchers independently came up with similar ideas and they, along with Prof Higgs, have long argued for the name of the particle to be changed. People have spoken of key contributions being made by Francois Englert, Peter Higgs, Gerald Guralnik, Tom Kibble, Robert Brout and Carl Hagen. Five spoke at a press conference last year to announce the discovery of a particle thought to be the Higgs, but it was only Prof Higgs who received a huge round of applause from the researchers present. "Peter Higgs was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognised by most of the audience. It was clear that Higgs was the dominant name because of the fact his name has become associated with the boson," Prof Hagen told BBC World News.

A spokeswoman from Cern - which operates the Large Hadron Collider - told BBC News that it was not up to the laboratory to determine the name of newly discovered particles. "Particles have generally been named by theorists who predict them, an example being the 'quark'; or by experimentalists who discover unpredicted particles such as the neutron," she said. "In all cases, the name eventually takes on common usage and is accepted by the particle physics community, and nowadays by the Particle Data Group who refer to Higgs bosons." At at a physics conference in March to discuss the discovery of the Higgs, researchers were encouraged to refer to the particle as the "SM Scalar Boson".

At the time, it was thought that this was because physicists wanted to be absolutely sure that the claimed particle really was the Higgs before naming it as such. Although six theorists are connected with developing the theory of the Higgs, many scientists believe that naming the particle after all of these individuals would be too much of a mouthful. Even acronyms created from the names of all six are inelegant. An example would be "BEHGHK", which would be pronounced "berk". Prof Hagen, who is affiliated to the University of Rochester, New York, suggests that it be called the Standard Model Scalar Meson, or SM Squared.

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